Immigrant families find help at Hope CommUnity Center in Apopka

Mariana Romero in the lobby of the Hope CommUnity Center in Apopka. (Joe Burbank, Orlando Sentinel )

November 29, 2013|By Kate Santich, Orlando Sentinel

Mariana Romero was a shy, scared 12-year-old when she first stepped off the school bus in Apopka — her new city in her new country.

She didn't speak English. She had never been to a place so big and chaotic. And she barely knew the father who had brought his family here from Mexico. A roofer and legal immigrant, he had returned to his tiny hometown only once every two years. It was all he could afford.

"But he wanted a better life for his children," Romero says now, a decade later. "He wanted to give us opportunities. I wanted that, too — until I came here and realized I had no idea where to go or what to do. I was lost."

Had she not found the Hope CommUnity Center in Apopka — one of the agencies supported by the Orlando Sentinel Family Fund — she might have stayed lost. She might, she says, have ended up like some of her fellow English for Speakers of Other Languages students: dropping out, getting pregnant, joining gangs.

"This place, it is everything to me," she says.

Sister Ann Kendrick, the Catholic nun who moved to Florida in 1971 to help launch this ministry, believes the formula is simple.

"What we do here is motivate," she says. "We show you that we see you, that you're not just some lost soul on the planet that nobody gives a hoot about. You've got brains. You've got talent. You've got character. You've maybe got chutzpah."

Last year, the center helped nearly 6,000 people in everything from parenting classes to GED tutoring to an emergency food pantry. But mostly, it offers a sense of belonging. For people who are poor, frightened, undereducated and disconnected, there is no stronger elixir.

Since Romero came to the center as a high-school freshman — at first for tutoring and a youth group — her life has evolved dramatically.

She has graduated from high school, earned a scholarship and is attending Seminole State College hoping to be a teacher. She has landed a position with AmeriCorps — the domestic version of the Peace Corps — and now works at a local elementary school while volunteering with the center's high-school youth group, the same program she once attended. It is called Sin Fronteras — "without limits."

Each Wednesday, dozens of students gather in a large conference room to share the stories of their lives and to learn empathy, resilience and respect, both for themselves and others. At some point, there is always laughter. Often, too, there are tears.

"Sometimes I think that, if I hadn't come to the center, I don't know what my life would be like," Romero says quietly. "At school, I didn't feel like I really fit anywhere. But here for the first time, someone understood. This center has changed my life in ways I never expected. I never thought I would be helping people like I am."

When her father's income dried up during the recession, he fell behind in the fees due to renew his children's visas. Romero was in her senior year of high school. She started to see her dreams of college slip away. She had nightmares that her family was once again divided: that she and her mother and sisters were sent back to Mexico. She didn't even want to be around other kids at school.

It seemed too hard to pretend that everything was fine.

But the center helped her father get a loan from a credit union it launched with the community years ago. It helped him navigate the citizenship process. It even helped Romero's mother — a woman reluctant to answer the phone in her own home because her English was so limited — to learn how to write a check and open an email account and keep tabs on her children's grades in the classroom.

And when Romero was then able to apply for a college scholarship from the center — an application that required an essay — a center volunteer gave her a lesson that, she says, will stay with her forever.

"This part here … you wrote that you want to be somebody," the volunteer said. "But Mariana, you are already somebody."